the eighth, says:  conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit—­that is, The endeavour whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite time but indefinite time.  That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual essence.  Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he contrived for his lack of faith.  Just as other men have a pain in hand or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache.  Unhappy man!  And unhappy fellow-men!

And man, this thing, is he a thing?  How absurd soever the question may appear, there are some who have propounded it.  Not long ago there went abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and much ill.  And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of facts.  Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only fragments of facts.  In psychology its action was harmful.  There were even scholastics meddling in literature—­I will not say philosophers meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if not even one and the same—­who carried this Positivist psychological analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.  The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its decomposition.

Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in envisaging consciousness itself, the “I.”  To ask a man about his “I” is like asking him about his body.  And note that in speaking of the “I,” I speak of the concrete and personal “I,” not of the “I” of Fichte, but of Fichte himself, the man Fichte.

That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of continuity.  A principle of unity firstly in space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention.  When we walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor, when we look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the other towards the south.  In each moment of our life we entertain some purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.  Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose.  And in a certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his action.  Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one single purpose, be it what it may.